VV(11): Oley Bergomask

[Dave Monroe]

Pressed for time here,  I'm going to skip ahead here, past "Any
sovereign or broken yo-yo," to which my own "umbilical string" will
inevitably "reconnect," and on to ...

"Oley Bergomask" (V., Ch. 8, Sec. i, p. 217)

>From the Encyclopedia Britannica Online ...

bergamasca

Also spelled Bergomask, lusty 16th-century dance depicting the reputedly
awkward manners of the inhabitants of Bergamo, in northern Italy, where
the dance supposedly originated. It was performed as a circle courtship
dance for couples: men circled forward and women backward until the
melody  changed; partners then embraced, turned a few steps, and began
again. The rustics in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream perform a
bergomask.

The bergamasca never became a court dance, although it gained some
popularity as an instrumental composition built on a ground bass. Claude
Debussy's Suite bergamasque (1890) and Gabriel Fauré's Masques et
bergamasques (1919) did not use the bergamasca as a specific musical
form; both works were inspired by Verlaine's poem "Clair de lune," in
which the name of the bygone dance bergamasque evokes a dreamy image.

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/printable/1/0,5722,80861,00.html

And from The Penguin Dictionary of Music  ...

(1) tune and chord-sequence apparently from Bergamo, Italy,
     widely used in 16th and 17th centuries, e.g. as ground bass.

(2) folk-dance from Bergamo.

(3) now a term used by composers with only the vaguest
     picturesque significance--e.g. by Debussy in Suite
     Bergamasque for piano (composed at intervals between
     1890 and 1905), which includes 'Clair de lune'.

The Penguin Dictionary of Music, © Arthur Jacobs 1997

http://www.xrefer.com/entry/352825

And, finally, from William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act
V, Scene I ...

Bottom. [Starting up] No, I assure you: the wall is
   down that parted their fathers.  Will it please you
   to see the epilogue, or to hear a Bergomask
   dance between two of our company?

Theseus.  No epilogue, I pray you ...
   ... But, come, your Bergomask.  Let your
  epilogue alone. [A dance.]

Theseus, King of Athens, is here politely refusing any continuation of
the farcical play-with-a-play of Pyramus and Thisby.  As he had puzzled
earlier, upon its being offered ...

   "A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
   And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth."
   Merry and tragical?  Tedious and brief?
   That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
   How shall we find the concord of this discord?

A tragicomedic ((c) Samuel Beckett) liebestod?  How very Pynchonian.
And note that that bergomask would have been danced by a pair of
rustics, i.e., "rude mechanicals."  Cf. SHOCK and SHROUD?  But why,
then, the "Oley"?  To complete the vaguely Scandinavian (Danish,
perhaps?) effect?  "Yel(l)o(w)" backwards, but ...